Your Right to Know

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoChris Russell | DispatchRepublican media maven Rex Elsass restored the historic Gooding House in Delaware County with money he made from commercials tearing down the opposition.

If Newt Gingrich emerges from the South
Carolina Republican primary to improbably become president, he will owe a good measure of his
success to the creative denizens of a 185-year-old former inn near Powell.

In the home originally built along the stagecoach route — now Rt. 23 — the public image of the
former House speaker from Georgia is being shaped, packaged and shipped to media outlets in one
primary election state after another.

Rooms once visited by President William Henry Harrison, Charles Dickens, and builder George
Gooding’s close friend Johnny Appleseed, now are filled with state-of-the-art equipment used to
produce hundreds of political advertisements for Gingrich and dozens of other Republican candidates
across the country.

The rapid success of the Strategy Group for Media is personified by its flamboyant and
controversial founder, Rex Elsass, a 49-year-old born-again Christian who owns a Bentley and gets
around town in a chauffer-driven Cadillac Escalade and across the nation in the company jet.

Once a ringleader of a GOP dirty-tricks group labeled the “nasty boys” more than 20 years ago,
Elsass has morphed into arguably the premier political adman in the country.

“You just don’t know who’s going to do well in life,” marveled Mary Anne Sharkey, now a
political consultant who coined the “nasty boys” moniker while Columbus bureau chief for
The Plain Dealer. “It’s kind of like your high-school prankster striking it rich.”

Ohio native Elsass, who at age 25 was elected to the Mansfield City Council, started the
business with his wife, Laurie, in their German Village carriage house in 1994. Now, he and the 23
full-time staffers in the employee-owned company have dumped $5 million into restoring and
expanding the stately Gooding House and a historic building on E. Capitol Street in Washington,
operation centers for what they say is the nation’s largest full-service political media firm.

“By any standard — whether it’s gross billings, number of clients, number of victories, number
of creative awards — we’re No. 1 in the country,” Elsass said from his office in what was the
living room of the Goodings’ home, where Mrs. Gooding delighted travelers with her pies.

A trophy case in the home’s reception area — adjacent to a curved bar where clients relax and
employees wind down at 4 o’clock Friday happy hours — bulges with Pollies and Tellys, the Emmys of
political advertising.

“We’ve won a ton of them the past few years,” Alex Tornero, a senior producer, said proudly
while leading a tour. “Last year, we won over 200 races, almost all of them. I think we lost only
about 10.”

Among the Strategy Group’s 240 clients in 2010 was Gov. John Kasich, who counts Elsass among his
close advisers, saying they connect on many levels, including spiritual.

“He takes his personal faith very seriously, which resonates with me,” Kasich said. “Rex, he
kind of gets me, and he’s good and he’s local. This business of faith leads to being a good guy,
and he’s got good people around him.”

During the past two presidential campaign cycles, the Strategy Group has worked for three GOP
candidates, including the 2008 failed bid of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. The firm started 2011
with Michele Bachmann’s campaign and takes credit for helping the Minnesota representative win the
Ames Straw Poll in Iowa last summer. Shortly after, Bachmann’s campaign fizzled, and “we kind of
officially separated,” Elsass said, becoming available to represent Gingrich.

In the realm of political advertising, bipartisan representation is impossible: “In terms of
business, you commonly end up working with people you share values with,” said Elsass, a
conservative Republican. “We’re a Republican company, and we’re committed to that. You can’t work
for Coke and Pepsi at the same time.”

Elsass said he strives to plow 65 percent of the company’s annual profit back into the business
to stay ahead of the competition en route to creating a rare one-stop media shop for
candidates.

Through collaboration with candidates and their campaign staffs, the Strategy Group
conceptualizes ads and other promotions, goes on location to shoot them, produces them and then
ships them posthaste to TV stations via an ad-buying subsidiary, Strategic Media Placement.

“We can be up on the air responding to an attack the same day rather than losing a day and
giving the opposition a full-day to have an unrebutted message,” Tornero said. “In a close race
coming down to the wire, you can’t beat it.”

Along the way, candidates must be convinced, cajoled and consoled. Elsass recalled the
exhilaration of winning the 2010 campaign for U.S. Senate in Kentucky when windmill-tilting Rand
Paul, an eye surgeon and son of the presidential candidate, started 20 points behind, his rawness
offset by passion.

“Initially, when we sat down with him, he said, ‘What do I need you for? I can go down to the
cable station and they can whip me up an ad.’ We were able to lay out a program, and he was able to
see the value. It was just an exciting, wonderful race.”

Kasich and other clients rave about the Strategy Group’s work, particularly a knack for
biographical ads using imagery to convey powerful messages. Elsass said ads are best when they “
share peoples’ hearts.”

“Simple, clear images tell profound emotional stories,” he said. “The simpler the better, the
fewer words the better, the more powerful the pictures the better. The best ads are ads when you
look at them, you see yourself.”

But some of the Strategy Group’s most-memorable ads are attack ads, and, fair or not, the firm
is known in Ohio for its negative spots. A widely condemned ad Elsass made for the Ohio Chamber of
Commerce in 2000, implying that a Democratic member of the Ohio Supreme Court took bribes, still
lives in infamy.

“His work is hard-hitting in the same way that Joe Frazier was hard-hitting,” said Ohio Auditor
Dave Yost, an Elsass client and admirer. “Rex is just as good as they get.”

Sharkey said she usually can identify one of his ads: “Even in this sea of negativity, you can
pick out an Elsass ad because he has a take-no-prisoners approach.”

One of Ohio’s most-colorful political operatives over the past three decades, Elsass followed a
tortured path to success, his ethics and tactics sometimes questioned. In 1994, shortly after
leaving his post as executive director of the Ohio Republican Party, Elsass became ensnarled in a
scandal involving the unauthorized use of a top-secret list of party donors. The late Dr. Bernadine
Healy, then a candidate for U.S. Senate, banished Elsass from managing her campaign.

It was a low point, Elsass said, causing him to “think about a lot of things. One of the things
was to get much more serious about my faith. I always had a belief in God, and I guess I was
politely involved, but I discovered something that is much greater, and that is having a
relationship with Christ.”

Elsass acknowledges that he has made mistakes, stressing that his faith “gives me hope,” but it “
does not make me less sinful, it does not make me more righteous. ... We are charged with the
mission of trying to win elections. I think we do that with honor and integrity and the highest
ethical standards.”